Bangert: Make ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’ great, again?

As Purdue unveils new location for masterwork, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Ellis makes a case for an iconic work for divisive times

An authorized copy of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" hangs in Purdue's Wilmeth Active Learning Center. The 12-by-21-foot painting is on loan to the university from the Washington Crossing Foundation.(Photo: Purdue University)

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The conversation with Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, had turned to today’s Washington, D.C., in particular a Donald Trump presidency and what future historians would decipher it let alone make of it, when the chit-chat from stragglers from a reunion started to drown out all else in the normally quiet corners of the Union Club Hotel at Purdue University.

Ellis made a game attempt Thursday evening not to be distracted by it all.

The sentiment dovetailed into a larger points made against the din: Washington as a place of money and re-election over everything; a political scene he’s convinced the first five U.S. presidents would have refused to take part in (“They would have considered it a form of prostitution,” he said); a national conversation more about daily chatter than context; and a president who “doesn’t really have a definition of reality against which the truth can be measured.”

As part of the Presidential Lecture Series, historian Joseph Ellis speaks about the painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" before unveiling the Purdue's copy of the masterwork in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center. Purdue has the 12-by-21-foot painting on loan from the Washington Crossing Foundation.(Photo: Charles Jischke/Purdue University)

“After a while, you get tired,” Ellis said of trying to make sense of the early stages of the Trump era. “In other words, it’s effective because you just totally get used to it. It’s a new normal. It doesn’t wear well.”

For now, he said, it wasn’t a job for the historians, yet, anyway.

“It’s very difficult to have historical perspective on things within your lifetime,” Ellis said. “Our faces are up against the window pane, and there are things we can’t see that will be clearer over time.”

Ellis stopped himself at that point: “But I’m not here, at Purdue University, to talk about Donald Trump.”

That was true. At least on the surface.

Purdue President Mitch Daniels invited Ellis to help re-introduce Purdue’s authorized copy of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” a 12-by-21-foot oil on canvas painting the university has had hanging in the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall since 2014, when it was loaned to the university by the Washington Crossing Foundation. (Purdue’s copy, one of several, was commissioned in 1969 by Ann Hawkes Hutton, Washington Crossing Foundation founder, in honor of her husband, Leon John Hutton, a 1929 Purdue graduate. The original is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)

Purdue’s copy was moved over the summer to the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, where it dominates the reading room of a hall that opened in time for the fall semester.

What Ellis came up with was a meditation on these divisive days, filtered through the distance of more than 200 years since a pivotal movement in the American Revolution -- and through an iconic piece that, itself, was done across the distance of time and geography in the mid-19th century by German painter Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze.

Here’s how he told it.

“That moment somehow captures the essence of American patriotism, or at least it has for several generations,” Ellis told an audience of roughly 200 about a painting depicting the Christmas night, 1776, river crossing from Pennsylvania into New Jersey ahead of the Battle of Trenton.

“The larger, more urgent question, at least as I see it, goes like this,” he said. “At a time when the American people are deeply divided, when political correctness has reached academic levels at our colleges and our universities, when political partisanship reigns supreme in Washington, when traditional codes of civility have virtually disappeared in our public discourse, what does American patriotism now mean?”

For Leutze, Ellis said, the painting wasn’t meant to capture American tastes. The artist’s aim through a series of paintings, including “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” was to show his conviction that “America was Europe’s crystal ball,” a set of visions and values that would sweep his home continent in time, Ellis said.

Leutze misfired on some of the details – the flag held behind Washington wouldn’t have been introduced by 1776, the boats used to carry Continental Army troops were actually tall-sided Durham freighters used to haul iron ore, among others – and he included passengers, including a woman and future President James Monroe, without much explanation.

“If you think we have a crisis now, this is nothing compared to what they were facing,” Ellis said. “The American Revolution was on the verge of collapse. This was a final fling. A roll of the dice.”

Washington was up against it in December 1776. The Continental Army had suffered demoralizing defeats. The British believed the revolution had been broken. Hearts and minds were being lost.

Purdue's copy of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" is unveiled Thursday after it was moved from the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall to the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, which opened in time for the fall semester. The painting has been on loan to Purdue from the Washington Crossing Foundation since 2014.(Photo: Charles Jischke/Purdue University)

When Washington led troops to fight a Hessian garrison of 1,500 in Trenton, only a fraction of his army made it across the Delaware. The mission was behind schedule, meaning Washington’s troops would have to attack during daylight rather than before dawn. Ellis said prudence meant turning back. Washington risked it all.

“As Washington himself put it, the cause would probably expire over the winter unless we are able to strike some stroke,” Ellis said. “The sense of drama and desperation Leutze captured on canvas was utterly accurate.”

He said to understand that there were still five years of fighting left for Washington and a Continental Army that would eventually win the war but would be sent home impoverished with no pension.

“So resilience comes to mind,” Ellis said. “In history and life, I believe, perhaps one of the most underappreciated virtues is that of resilience.”

And then this, spoken as a fellow citizen in partisan times.

“I see a diverse cross-section of human beings, all gathered in the same boat, rowing together,” Ellis said. “At this moment, they are not men or women, they are not blacks or whites, they are not New Englanders or westerners. They are Americans. And they all assume their common future lies ahead of them, on the New Jersey shore, not behind them in America.

“There’s no such thing as let’s make America great ‘again.’ Again, what?”

Ellis let that sink in before he continued.

“Though the winds of the moment were in their faces, they all fervently believed the winds of history were at their backs,” Ellis said. “And the looming events are about to confirm that they are right. That dawn is about to break. And as someone once said, it is always morning in America. And I think it still is.”

That’s why Joseph Ellis was at Purdue University.

Makes you wonder what the painting looks when they push themselves back from the window pane we’re looking through right now.